Christina Broom: Britain's 1st Female Press Photographer

Christina Broom - Museum of London Collection

Christina Broom was credited as being "the UK's first female press photographer" and yet, despite her many achievements, her incredible life and work remain relatively unknown. “Historically she has been seen as an eccentric amateur, which has meant her work hasn’t seen the light of day in quite the way it should have done,” says Anna Sparham, who has curated a large exhibition of Broom’s photography, at the Museum of London.

Christina’s maiden name was Livingston and her parents were Scottish, although she was born at 8 King's Road, Chelsea, London, the seventh of eight children on 28 December 1862. Her father was Alexander Livingston, a master bootmaker and her mother was Margaret Fair Livingston. 

Her parents were well-off, but She must have rather exaggerated their worth, because when Christina told her fiancee, Albert, that she was not quite the heiress he thought she was, he asked her not to tell his mother. Christina’s brother Robert had already squandered much of the family inheritance at the gaming tables in Monaco, and her only income was the rent from a small house on nearby Oakley Street, which Oscar Wilde let from her to house his mother in – Broom would later testify at his trial.

Christina married Albert Edward Broom in 1889 and they had a daughter Winifred Margaret, who was born 7 August 1890. In 1903 the failure of the family ironmongery business was due to a cricketing accident which left her husband Albert an invalid after being struck on the shin by a ball. The injury was serious, causing necrosis of the tibia and fibulae bones. On the advice of a friend, the Brooms opened a small stationery shop in the middle-class suburb of Streatham. Although it never generated the income they hoped for, it was here that Christina noticed the booming trade in postcards which were all the rage. There were seven reliable postal deliveries a day; it was possible to send a card to someone in the same town and receive an answer within hours.

Christina Broom's Postcard Stall in London

Forced to become the main breadwinner for her family, Christina borrowed a box camera and taught herself the rudiments of photography when it was still very much in its infancy. She set up a stall in the Royal Mews at Buckingham Palace, selling postcards of photographs that she had taken. She maintained this stall from 1904 until 1930. 

Because newspapers were for the most part still unable to reproduce photographs, postcards were also used as a means of disseminating news, and Broom’s enterprise happened to coincide with a period of great upheaval in British history – she captured both the Suffragette movement and the First World War with an unusual, almost maternal intimacy.

She also turned her lens on the more humdrum details of city life, producing many streetscapes and informal portraits in which her sitters appear wonderfully unguarded.

Even though, by the turn of the century, photography had passed muster as a “suitable” pastime for women, most of Broom’s female cohorts preferred to operate from the safety of a studio, and to focus only on friends and family. Broom lugged her camera through the city instead, jostling for space among the male photographers of the press.

Anna Sparham says: “The testing circumstances in which she found herself stimulated her independent and resourceful qualities, but there were plenty of obstacles to overcome… conquering the apparatus was only one; having the nerve and ability to take these skills into the street, publicly projecting herself as a ‘professional photographer’, and most significantly as a woman, was another.”

When the family moved to a new house in Burnfoot Avenue, she used the coal cellar as her dark room. She was assisted by her daughter Winifred, who had left school to help and was extremely devoted for all of her life, both to the photography work and to her mother. Albert wrote the captions for the postcards in his neat script. The postcards sold well: in one night-time session Broom printed 1000.

Chelsea Barracks from Museum of London Collection

Christina was appointed official photographer to the Household Division of the Army from 1904 to 1939 and had her own darkroom in the Chelsea Barracks; she also took photographs of local scenes, including those at Buckingham Palace, as well as The Boat Race and Suffragette marches. Her portraits included  leading suffragettes such as Emmeline Pankhurst and Emily Wilding Davidson. Although Broom’s photography is immersed in an Edwardian era of grandeur and tradition,  it also conveys and acknowledges change.

Suffragettes - Museum of London Collection

 It is in her coverage of the suffragette movement that we glimpse most of her character. Although she always sought to retain a respectable impartiality in her work, here we sense a fascination and a growing appreciation. In its bright, early days the ideas must have chimed particularly with Christina’s own struggles.

When Albert Broom died in 1912, Christina and Winifred moved to Munster Road, Fulham where she took the professional name of Mrs Albert Broom. Her daughter Winnie became a VAD nurse during the First World War.

Courtesy of Museum of London

By 1915 Broom had become firmly established, selling photographs to many newspapers and magazines which featured the images of her soldier friends. Her er wartime photographs cover a huge range of subject matter from Soldiers leaving to for the front, right through to those returning wounded. She also took a rare shor of Rudyard Kipling's son John who was killed in 1915 aged 18.

Her portraits were purchased in the hundreds by soldiers who sent them home to their families; she did more for conscription, Field Marshall Frederick Roberts said, than his prayers for new recruits ever had. He was so impressed by Broom’s work that he recommended her to the King.

She attended a tea party at Buckingham Palace held for wounded soldiers in 1916 and her meetings with King George V, both before, during and after the war, would prove fruitful for her career as a press photographer. The increasingly close relationship she enjoyed with the royal family led to some of her most impressive scoops.

She was allowed great privileges and had special access to major royal events and occasions. Broom was given an exclusive commission with the Prince of Wales and produced a lovely portrait of the young prince.

Broom was the only person allowed in to see King Edward VII when he died and was lying in state. She was allowed into Westminster Abbey to photograph him at 4am in the morning. In the 1920s and 1930s her work was featured in top publications such as the Illustrated London News, The Tatler, The Sphere, and Country Life.

Christina Broom's Portrait of Pankhurst - Museum of London

   Letters and journals from the time point to Broom being accepted and respected by many of her male peers. One of the royal photographers, Ernest Brooks, gave Broom a few tips. In one note he wrote: “I am extremely sorry for you having so much worry… Hope you will soon be all right. It warrants a good nerve I know.”

The physical strain of carrying around 40 pounds worth of camera equipment across London caught up with Broom, and eventually she was confined to a wheelchair. However, if Broom found herself with crippling back pain, her daughter Winfred would push her to the barracks or the Royal Mews in her wheelchair, so that she was still able to use her camera. By the Thirties, she had closed her stall selling postcards and begun to spend more time in Margate, where she and Winnie liked to fish. 

Christina Broom died on 5 June 1939 and was buried in Fulham old cemetery. 

With the outbreak of the 2nd World War, restrictions on military photography had tightened considerably, and, despite her best efforts, Winnie found she could no longer continue running the family business. She eventually retired in Margate, where she died in 1973, but not before Queen Mary had personally recommended she save her mother’s plates for the nation. Winifred was instrumental in safeguarding Christina's negatives by having them housed in various public institutions and museums. 

Collections of Christina Broom’s photographs are held at the Museum of London, the National Portrait Gallery, the Imperial War Museum, London, the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, the Royal Maritime Museum, Greenwich, the Guards Museum, London; the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Local Studies Library; the Hammersmith and Fulham Archive and the National Army Museum; Maidstone Art Gallery, Kent; and the Harry Ransom Center and the Gernsheim Collection, University of Texas, both at Austin, Texas

On 17 December 2009 a collection of some 2,000 of her photographs, mainly of military subjects, was to be offered for sale by auction at Sotheby's in London. The collection was expected to make up to £35,000. It failed to sell and was acquired privately by the Museum of London.  In June 2015, the museum opened an exhibition of her photographs entitled Soldiers and Suffragettes.

Anna Sparham for the Museum of London said: 

'Bearing in mind she's this small-framed lady working in this quite often male-dominated environment, she has this ability to really pull people together to form lovely compositions.

'She seizes their attention and you always get a sense of her relationship with her subjects, whether that's the suffragettes or powerful soldiers going off to war.'

Broom, would have needed to be quite the character herself, as well as determined, as she pursued a career that was a far cry from the trajectory expected of a woman at the beginning of the 20th Century.

 

'Christina would have had to have been quite a determined lady,she is described as quite formidable and I think to embrace the world of photography, which within her world was fairly unique, it would have been quite a brave thing to do.'

VIDEO ON CHRISTINA BROOM FROM THE MUSEUM OF LONDON